We early find ourselves chanting insults, bouncing balls, choosing
sides, or skipping rope in measured and rhymed verses that become
engraved in our minds. In school, generations of us learned by heart
texts that echoed through life: Poe's "Bells,'' Scott's "Lochinvar,''
Browning's "How They Brought the Good News From Ghent to Aix,''
Kipling's "Gunga Din,'' anonymous ballads.

Yet few Americans would confess to liking poetry in any form, let
alone to actually reading it, even occasionally.

This sad state of affairs was underscored last year, when The Los
Angeles Times--in a move that drew national attention--decided that it
would no longer review books of poems.

Although the reasons for widespread indifference to poetry are
complex, the schools certainly bear much of the responsibility.

Poetry in school used to be fun. I still remember counting the
tintinnabulation of the refrain in Poe's work: the word "bells''
repeated 13--or was it 15?--times. As I chanted the poem before a
class, I moved my fingers behind my back.

I was vaguely confused about young Lochinvar's swimming the Eske
River where "ford there was none.'' "Ford,'' I thought dimly, referred
to a car.

We could even win prizes for a form of advanced recitation called
"elocution,'' in which we learned to express the dramatic import of a
text.
We lost ourselves in these works, whatever their eternal esthetic
value. The sound was catchy, and, for the most part, we immediately
understood the compelling contents.

We learned some history in the trochees of "Hiawatha'' and the
dactyls of "Evangeline.'' Poe's "Annabel Lee'' produced a sad,
pleasurable resonance among adolescents discovering the anguish of
young love.

Out of school, we repeated naughty limericks and other forms of
light verse, like the irreverent ditties of Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland, and the traditional ballads of the current folk
singers.

In high school and college, poetry became an opportunity for serious
intellectual pleasure in small advanced classes, occasions to resolve
the complexities and ambiguities of a text. A proper course in
Dickinson, say, or in Yeats required spending hours Talmudically
explicating a word, a phrase, a sentence, and analyzing the sounds of
lines. No lawyer, scientist, businessman, or government official, if he
wants to learn to use language to best effect, could do better than to
read poems with committed care.

The communal reading and sharing we once practiced in and out of
school remain important for the enjoyment and understanding of great
poetry. Homer's Odyssey and Iliad were preserved by a bard's chant, and
the texts of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides in theatrical
presentation during quasi-religious occasions. With the exception of
the sonnets and a few long poems, Shakespeare wrote his great works to
be spoken in performance. And many contemporary poets read their verse
in concert or nightclub-like settings.

We might attribute the current decline of poetry in part to
pedagogical confusions.

Memorizing fell into disuse during the era of permissiveness because
it was mechanical, more often replacing than reinforcing teaching and
learning.

Under the pressures of intellectual fashions, the schools--properly,
I think--rejected the shallow sentimentality of many traditionally
popular works, such as Joyce Kilmer's "Trees,'' but foundered in
dealing with respectable substitutes. When once I tried to get a class
of teachers to respond to Robert Frost's "Birches,'' for instance, I
found they were at a loss, talking about dendrology and Frost's
biography rather than the sense of the poem.

To encourage children to be "creative,'' teachers pushed the merits
of free verse. For example, they urged children to write haiku, those
fiendishly compacted, seemingly offhand miniatures which our Imagist
poets tried so earnestly to imitate with such indifferent results.

The new verse forms, many teachers said, were emancipated from the
old-fashioned constraints of meter, rhyme, and stanza. Of course,
unhampered by sense, punctuation, or craft, anyone can grunt
spontaneously. It subverts the character of poetry to teach that form
diminishes richness or freedom of expression.

Just as too many teachers still prepare their charges to write
without first teaching them what and how to read, too many detach
poetry from content and context. The schools are now producing
generations who regard it with an uncomprehending, grudging, pietistic
awe: Poetry was created back in time somewhere, in the olden days when
Shakespeare and somebody named Wadsworth used to hang out together.

And many readers look on the elusive mysteries of much current
writing with hostility, suspicious that artsy conspirators are putting
over still another hoax on them, as they did with the painting of
Picasso and Pollock.

The Los Angeles Times dropped the reviewing of poetry with
ambivalence. Jack Miles, editor of the book review, pointed out that
while he would no longer run reviews of volumes of poetry, he would
publish "one brief poem in each Sunday issue ... with just a word about
its author and the new collection from which it had been taken.''

His reasoning was simple and, like much good poetry, based on a
clear recognition of reality. Not many newspaper readers buy or read
volumes of poetry, Mr. Miles argued; reviewers of poetry are likely to
be highly specialized experts, best understood by their fellows; and
many contemporary poems themselves are nearly impossible for most
readers to understand.

Indeed, publishing an actual poem, forcing readers to deal with it
as they are able, might do more for poetry today than criticism that
compounds the difficulties. As Jonathan Yardley, the Washington Post's
book reviewer, has written, "Contemporary American poetry is read by
poets, by writing students, and by students of literature--and by
almost no one else.''

Nevertheless, a few respected journals continue to pay tribute to
poetry on the page. The New Yorker and The American Scholar list poems
of 10 lines with the same emphasis in their tables of contents as they
do lengthy essays or short stories. Such gestures reflect a powerful,
if increasingly vestigial, respect for poetry.

I wonder whether the new candor about the problems of poetry might
not pique us to pay it more attention, both in and out of school. We
enjoy words--on television, in the puzzle sections of newspapers, in
boxed adult games. Is not poetry another area to explore in the
landscape of language?

We might read poems aloud to friends and family, however
self-consciously for a while, in the way we share epigrams and clever
insults; we might ruminate about the import and effect of a text, in
the way we mull over the meaning of a politician's comment.

Might we not revive with profit recitation of the old classics as
part of the effort to teach communication?

We should reinstate in all levels of schooling a knowledgeable,
receptive examination of poetry in every form and idiom: classical and
modern, public and private, mundane and recondite, plain and ornate,
from the naive to the sophisticated.

Morris Freedman teaches English at the University of Maryland.

Vol. 07, Issue 27, Page 22

Published in Print: March 30, 1988, as Slowing the Decline of Poetry

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